I admit it derailed somewhat. My point was simply to try my luck at explaining where that sentiment from the original poster might have come from — disdain for creativity without exchange value. At the time I posted it, I felt like we were all in agreement anyway that the take was dumb, and I didn't intend on making it a big argument either, just a single addition, before Melon responded to it and it kinda grew from there.
I intended it to be a quick excursion, not a takeover of the thread; and it's not like I forced the topic to come back to economics and philosophy myself, various people participated in that argument.
I am more than happy to end the tangent from my end, and resume on the actual subject.
Your line of questioning is important to consider, But I'd stray away from the big we's as im sure you dont comprehensively know everyone you're including in using that word!
I deliberately phrased it somewhat provocatively to make people question it, and then rip it down in the next paragraph again. Because I am not sure what the right answer is; are we all doing that, or not, by way of being on the retro web? The answer of course is not yes, since as you said I can't include literally everyone in that 'we';
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Im curious--what are your reasons for joining melonland? You seem to have a lot of retroweb knowledge, so im sure something in that is part of it? Do you find yourself trying to replicate your modes of interacting on the big name social medias to melonland?
Not particularly in every way. Mainstream social media how I used to use it is centered around getting an opinion out to the world to influence people, or showing off one's life with attempts at viral content, almost like an advertisement of oneself to find friends. It is reputation based. Everything revolves around reputation there: like ratios, comments, being cancelled or loved, friends, followers, numbers, views.
This often leads to unhealthy and toxic habits: obsessing about labels and aesthetics (to get likes/validation for them, and to build a reputation), starting and participating in arguments because you cannot let something stand with this like/dislike ratio or unagreeable comment section (to destroy someone else's reputation). This lead to pretty considerable anxiety issues whenever I would get a notification or saw a thread I could comment in, because I was afraid my reputation would be hurt.
On Melonland, a few of those still hold up since it is still social media. I create some content only to show it off here, for example, because feedback makes me happy. I have recently developed some sort of anxiety again from unread posts here, because I have been in a debate in another thread, and even this reply cost some of my sanity because the anxiety flared up since my mind felt like the 'speak for yourself' thing was the beginning of an argument or an attack on me and an indicator that I was not well liked here. For me, it's a beeping big red warning sign for myself that I am developing the same kind of obsession-about-reputation that I did on social media. It's just slower here since there are less people and the posts are longer, making low effort comebacks and snappy one liner jabs less likely than on, say, Twitter. But even here you have 'reputation': Melon is king since he owns this place, common posters and older profiles will have more gravitas behind their words, and when someone gets into a debate at one place, the person will become 'problematic' in the subconscious of many people and be disregarded more often when it comes to in-group building and even the content they post. That's not the fault of Melonland, but of forums as a whole, and of my own biases and damages than social media obsession did to me in the past.
I think the web furthest from those mechanisms is personal websites themselves. The less visible interactability, the less anxiety and pressure to comment and get into arguments. The less viewer feedback, the less people pleasing and the more authentic it is. You simply don't really feel your reputation until someone reaches out to you personally. And when you really do want to interact, you will write a mail: which is something you will have to do unprompted, and you're less inclined to start arguments, write snarky comments or hate mail with an actual email address. If there are no public comments, there is no reason for many people to troll, because they feed on the general public judging with them, not sending personal mail to someone.
I suppose the multi century tradition of dialectical materialism is simply a young people thing then, and as you go older you will stop accepting material reality and tangible lived experience in favor of existentialist mind games, because... emotions mature. Ooookay. Whatever. I had weirder thought processes on acid, so who am I to judge.
There is no existence beyond the tangible, material world.
Thats simply not true, the future and the past are not tangible, but they exist.
They are tangible, just not observable from this point in time. Just because I cannot reach the inside of a rock it doesn't mean it's not tangible. The philosophical dichotomy is the material world and the ideal world, as in, the realm of concepts, deities, ideas and consciousness. Marxists accept the existence of both but stress that it is the material world that shapes ideas and concepts, not the other way 'round.
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How do you want to exist without ever participating in anything productive or using the environment?
Im not making a binary statment, Im making a paradoxical statment! Nothing matters and everything matters. Economics are obsolete and we need them. Humans don't matter and we do. You're clinging to this idea that things have to be one or the other but Im saying they are both.
If you accept that your statements are paradoxical then I can discard them because I don't believe things that I know are false. I don't know why you would.
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Why would I settle for a world in which nothing matters and existence is wrong?
Why would you assume that existence is right or wrong? It's neither, it simply is. Nothing matters, you came from nothing and you'll go to nothing; yet everything matters, the stars could not exist if you were not here (because you are part of this universe and without you this universe would not be this universe). Nothing matters and everything matters, in a loop forever. That doesn't mean you should not enjoy your lunch, it just means that like you, your lunch is everything and nothing.
You posited that existing while using the world is wrong and rooted in irrational, biblical ideas, while at the same time denying that good and bad even exist. You seem to thrive in contradiction and paradoxisms and gleefully deconstructing what we can observe and conclude, in favor of nihilism, where nothing matters and we shall all die meaninglessly.
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Philosophy is not an abstract menace that attacks the realities of life, it is an expansion of life, a duality that adds more beyond our literal bounds.
That is why the philosophy I embrace is dialectical materialism. We also have a duality, but it is the functional description of the workings of the world and can lead us somewhere instead of giving up, proclaiming nihilism and denying that facts and falsehoods exist.
I think we simply won't find common ground here because it seems to be part of your immutable world view that things can be themselves and their opposites at the same time, that you embrace believing in nothing and everything, that logic (as in formal logic, logic of expressions) itself is irrelevant and close minded. It is far removed from my lived reality since I have too many very material things to worry about: a paycheck, global suffering, war, my stomach and mental health, too many tangible needs to just sit in an ivory tower and contemplate whether useful and useless are things that exist or can be one and the same. Thoughts that only privileged people can embrace who can afford to dissociate from the material — those who have no unmet material needs hence no reminder of the material world or a need to act within it. Again, opening your mind is well and good in a first world country with a cushy existence, but is a cynical thing to say in the face of a starving child in the middle of a warzone — tell them that use value does not exist when it comes to a crumb of bread or clean water, or that they can find happiness by changing their mindset, or that they actually matter not a single bit and their pained death will be just as meaningless as struggling against it. It is a philosophy that cannot prevail through history, since crises and revolutions will remind people of the very real material needs and relations that exist when they are faced with their grimness. And when capitalism and therefore the class struggle and therefore the basis for such dissociation from oneself and one's existence as a human are eradicated, that philosophy shall vanish in the annals of class era history.
Alas, I think arguing can do us no good, since our world views differ fundamentally and therefore our arguments will be meaningless to the other, because the premises and presuppositions are different.
I mean, that just proves the incredible power of capitalism to alienate oneself from one's very own being as a human to the point of resenting oneself. Destructive for-profit production has tainted the entire idea of human existence as something disruptive, unnatural and immoral.
In contrast to that, we struggle not for defeatism and giving up human existence in favor of a spiritual idealist etherity rooted in grand theoretical ideals of nonphysical acorporeality, but for a world with better conditions where we can be free to be humans without slaving away for profit and someone else's productive goals.
And Marx' idea is really not rooted in Christianity in any way. It's not a theory either, the fact that we produce things is all around us. I mean, you cook — that's production. If you want to give up production, then stop making websites, making yourself food, raising potential children, or even having a digestive system.
How do you want to exist without ever participating in anything productive or using the environment? Do you advocate for eradicating the human race? We can produce in unison with nature, beyond capitalism, but we cannot cease to produce. You propose a world where we ignore all factual things in favor of some ethereal existence beyond... the concept of objects and relations between them. We will literally die without production and utility. All we do is production and reproduction.
I posit these terms are not useless because we currently, literally, physically, obviously live in this world. Capitalism exists, and socialism is its negation, and there is no world without an economic system. Classes tangibly exist. Ceasing to describe the world and how it works is not liberating, it's numbing and nauseating.
There is no existence beyond the tangible, material world. There is nothing useless because even your idea gives you comfort, which is your use value. You abstract the world into nothingness, but that is a useless and impotent description.
Why would I settle for a world in which nothing matters and existence is wrong? Nobody who has suffered from material needs accepts the idea that you should give up the struggle in favor of nothingness and meaninglessness. Try telling a starving child that food is of no use to them and that they should simply open their mind to be free.
Switched to Artix a couple of days ago and it's great. Xfce is still my favorite desktop environment, I even turned on system sounds for the clickies and the beeps.
That's why I see parts of the retro web revival as part of a socialist counterculture, opposed to participating in commodity production. It can create class consciousness.
We seek to liberate both the web and us as users from being commodities, and we are all in agreement here, I think, that a website should not be a commodity, and neither should our data.
In what we do here, we are not engaging in commodity production, since none of it is produced for an exchange value. This entire thread is meant to dunk on the person who made the 'usefulness' comment, and I meant to expose that they did not actually mean use value (because practically everything has a use to someone, "consuming" a personal website can satisfy a social need or a need for viewing art and engaging in a community, for example), but exchange value or perhaps even capital.
I think we are all technically in agreemwnt but not on the same page currently.
While it's quite jauntily worded, I'd say that Melooon makes a very compelling argument. Why view all aspects of life as commodities? Sure, things are commodified under capitalism, but I feel like the example you used of a haircut being a product consumed at production is the bleak outlook, rather than the idea of inherent nonsense in the universe. In a post-corporate/hyper-productive world, a haircut given to someone would be an act of kindness--a need fulfilled for the purpose of making each other well. Thinking of it (solely) as a commodity erases that aspect of what a post-capitalist world even stands for.
By all means, have you read the rest? That's exactly what it says. The essence of a capitalist economy is that these things are commodified. That is an unfortunate but observable fact, since you can go out and buy a haircut as a commodity. But we as socialists are opposed to that, for a world in which these things are no longer commodities, and commodity production no longer exists.
Slavery, for example, forcibly turned humans into commodities. People abolished slavery, and therefore humans are no longer traded as commodities.
You are right, nothing is inherently a commodity — but in this current economic system they are. Which is bad. It alienates us from the product of our labor, or in other words, makes websites and haircuts impersonal. That's half of the entire point of Marx.
All I did was state an observation about the state of the world — commodities exist — not state that this is good. Socialism negates capitalism and will therefore liberate these things from the status of a commodity.
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